The Boring Life Of A Curator

It's kind of like seeing how you'd react if Karen from Purchasing started idly pulling her sweater off in the middle of a meeting.

Jan 29, 2007

WE CAME ACROSS THIS while dutifully thumbing through a new art book called Curve: The Female Nude Now (Universe Publishing, $40). This series, the book tells us, is called Strip No. 4 Curator, and the woman pictured happens to be the artist herself, London photographer Jemima Stehli, who asked male art critics, writers, and curators to sit for her while she stripped in front of them. We called her up and asked, What gives? "These were people I knew," Stehli says, "and it was about putting them in a supposedly neutral situation, introducing something-- my body--and seeing what else was going on there. And it was much closer than it looks. I was standing three feet away. Matthew [Higgs, the curator shown here] looked straight at the camera in every shot." So it's kind of like seeing how you'd react if Karen from Purchasing started idly pulling her sweater off in the middle of a meeting. Whatever else is going on there, we like to think we'd show a little more appreciation than Matthew did.

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